Transition Towns and Process Work

10 May 2010

by Emily Hodgkinson

Over the last year I’ve been working for Transition Leicester, one of the Transition Town organisations.  The Transition Towns movement is a response to the challenges of peak oil and climate change. The basic premise is that we have built modern life based on the availability of cheap oil, and that this won’t be around for much longer. In the near future we will need to become more resilient in every way as we become less able to depend on cheap oil for our everyday living. It is an attempt to wean ourselves off of our addiction to oil. The Transition Towns ethos arises from the principles of permaculture and the insights of deep ecology, and organisations try to facilitate empowerment of communities by positive visioning, re-skilling, and providing emotional and psychological support for processing change.

I’ve been working on a project with colleagues in Transition Leicester which looks at first glance like a peer group-based carbon reduction project. Several similar, excellent projects exist in the UK already - the idea is you get a group of acquaintances together and spend an evening per month looking at how to reduce your carbon footprint in different areas of your life, with a trained facilitator to guide you along a fairly structured process. What’s different about our project? We are applying Process-Oriented thinking to the question of climate change, so we don’t just tell people what they should do, but instead bring awareness to the issues.  We’ve been creating Process Work and Transition style exercises for individuals to process many aspects of our impact on the planet, for example in one session we have a structured role play with an object you are about to throw away, and then ask about how we treat parts of ourselves as disposable too. Finally we are disseminating facilitation skills to support communities to work in groups and address conflict because we think the planet means all of us - and so saving it also means learning about rank and diversity, how we scapegoat others for ‘eco-crimes’, how unaddressed conflict becomes a psychological waste-dump. We’ll be trying to bring awareness to the group environment and to the relationship between inner and outer, between the group and the world.

These are our high dreams! However we are still at the stage of developing our materials and it is a lot of work. We intend to run a number of pilot groups from September 2010, and the pilot phase will be evaluated by a researcher from Leicester University.

Emily Hodgkinson, RSPOPUK Diploma holder

Contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or www.transitionleicester.org.uk

The Transition Leicester CO2 project acknowledges the huge amount of support, including use of original material, given by Cambridge Carbon Footprint, an established CO2 reduction project.